Corporate-speak: what's it good for?

A Marginal Revolution reader writes them with a great question:

Why does the corporate world use language so inefficiently? Why turn a simple thing like "talking to a client about their needs" into a five-step process (distinguished, no doubt, by an acronym)? Do companies think that they create net value when they brand a common thing like human conversation as a one-of-a-kind, complex process – even after the costs of being opaque, jargonistic, and long-winded are taken into account?

To which Tyler Cowen replies:

People disagree in corporations, often virulently, or they would disagree if enough real debates were allowed to reach the surface. The use of broad generalities, in rhetoric, masks such potential disagreements and helps maintain corporate order and authority. Since it is hard to oppose fluffy generalities in any very specific way, a common strategy is to stack everyone's opinion or points into an incoherent whole. Disagreement is then less likely to become a focal point within the corporation and warring coalitions are less likely to form.

This answer seems unsatisfying to me, mainly because I don't think this use of corporate-speak would justify its costs. Because of its transparent stupidity, corporate-speak is highly demoralizing; your employees aren't going to be very happy if you ask them to show up to work wearing clown suits. In addition to this, corporate-speak is used not only for assertions, but for instructions as well; why would you instruct your employees in such incoherent and inefficient ways?

For more possible answers, see the MR comments. My own hypothesis is that I have no idea.